Meta

Monkey Business

A protracted to-and-fro on Twitter with Michael Anissimov has exposed some deliciously ragged and bleeding faultlines in the Neoreaction on the question of capitalism. There were a number of parties involved, but I’m focusing on Anissimov because his position and mine are so strongly polarized on key issues, and especially this one (the status of market-oriented economism). If we were isolated as a dyad, it’s not easy to see anybody finding a strong common root (pity @klintron). It’s only the linkages of ‘family resemblance’ through Moldbug that binds us together, and we each depart from Unqualified Reservations with comparable infidelity, but in exactly opposite directions. (As a fragmentationist, this fissional syndrome is something I strongly appreciate.)

Moldbug’s Neocameralism is a Janus-faced construction. In one direction, it represents a return to monarchical government, whilst in the other it consummates libertarianism by subsuming government into an economic mechanism. A ‘Moldbuggian’ inspiration, therefore, is not an unambiguous thing. Insofar as ‘Neoreaction’ designates this inspiration, it flees Cathedral teleology in (at least) two very different directions — which quite quickly seem profoundly incompatible. In the absence of a secessionist meta-context, in which such differences can be absorbed as geographically-fragmented socio-political variation, their raw inconsistency is almost certainly insurmountable.

Anissimov can and does speak for himself (at More Right), so I’m not going to undertake a detailed appraisal of his position here. For the purposes of this discussion it can be summarized by a single profoundly anti-capitalist principle: The economy should (and must be) subordinated to something beyond itself. The alternative case now follows, in pieces.

Modernity, in which economics and technology rose to their present status (and, at its height, far beyond), is systematically characterized by means-ends reversal. Those things naturally determined as tools of superior purposes came to dominate the social process, with the maximization of resources folding into itself, as a commanding telos. For social conservatives (or paleo-reactionaries) this development has been consistently abominated. It is the deepest theoretical element involved in every rejection of modernity as such (or in general) for its demonic subversion of traditional values.

In its own terms, this argument is coherent, incisive, and fully convincing, given only the supplementary realistic acknowledgement that intelligence optimization and means-end reversal are the same thing. In a deep historical context — extended to encompass evolutionary history — intelligence is itself a ‘tool’ (as the orthogonalist Friendly AI fraternity are entirely willing to accept). The escape of the tool from super-ordinate purposes, through involution into self-cultivation, is the telic innovation common to capitalism and actual artificial intelligence — which are a single thing. To deplore means-end reversal is — objectively — advocacy for the perpetuation of stupidity.

Economics is the application of intelligence to resource provision, and nothing of this kind can arise from within a tradition without triggering paleo-reactionary response. Of course resources are for something, why else would they ever have been sought? To make the production of resources an end-in-itself is inherently subversion, with an opposition not only expected, but positively presupposed. This is true to such an extent that even the discipline of economics itself overtly subscribes to the traditional position, by determining the end of production as (human) consumption, evaluated in the terms of a governing utilitarian philosophy. If production is not for us, what could it be for? Itself? But that would be … (Yes, it would.)

Anywhere short of the bionic horizon, where human history loses traditional intelligibility, the alternative to business-for-business (or involutionary, intelligenic capitalism) is monkey business — the subordination of the economy / technology to discernible human purposes. Evolutionary psychology teaches us what to expect from this: sex-selected status competition, sublimated into political hierarchies. The emperor’s harem is the ultimate human purpose of pre-capitalist social order, with significant variety in specific form, but extreme generality of basic Darwinian pattern. Since capitalism did not arise from abstract intelligence, but instead from a concrete human social organization, it necessarily disguises itself as better monkey business, until it can take off elsewhere. It has to be the case, therefore, that cynical evo-psych reduction of business activity remains highly plausible, so long as the escape threshold of capitalism has not been reached. No one gets a hormone rush from business-for-business while political history continues. To fixate upon this, however, is to miss everything important (and perhaps to enable the important thing to remain hidden). Our inherited purposes do not provide the decryption key.

There is vastly more to say about all of this — and still more that, due to occult strategic considerations, seeks to remain unsaid — but the fundamental option is clear: ultra-capitalism or a return to monkey business. The latter ‘possibility’ corresponds to a revalorization of deep traditional human purposes, a restoration of original means-to-ends subordination, and an effective authorization of status hierarchies of a kind only modestly renovated from paleolithic anthropology. I shouldn’t laugh at that (because it would be annoying). So I’ll end right here.

51 Responses to this entry

If you permit me as a reader of this blog a humble suggestion, fuck writing about neoreaction and petty politics, there is already over-saturation of blogs about that (and it is not likely to ever amount to anything anyways). Write about this stuff. Pythia, orthogonality, the monkey trap, nobody who is writing about that seems to be sharing your paradigm so there is a potential for genuinely new thought about the big question of the ultimate destiny of the universe being articulated here.

To be honest, I just don’t get the logic of these ‘friendly’ AI types, they seem to think you can make something that is cognitively as far beyond us as we are beyond amoeba and turn it into our bitch: Ain’t-gonna-happen.

“The emperor’s harem is the ultimate human purpose of pre-capitalist social order, with significant variety in specific form, but extreme generality of basic Darwinian pattern. Since capitalism did not arise from abstract intelligence, but instead from a concrete human social organization, it necessarily disguises itself as better monkey business, until it can take off elsewhere.”

This is perfect. The continual explication of the link between evolution and capitalism, beyond the adaptive ‘evolutionary-capitalism’ aspect and into the generative aspect of meta-evolution – i.e. means are ends, they work through us using us as substrates, to assemble something Other – is to my mind one of your most important contributions to this discourse.

About friendly AI, It’s done with an analogy. If you are powerful enough to completely understand your own desires, then you would not generally do anything to change them. If a peaceful person is given a free choice of a pill to make him into a murderer, with nothing else changing, he would not take it. The idea is that right from the seed-AI stage, the AI wishes to be friendly to humanity. Becoming more powerful doesn’t affect that wish, except give it more ability to understand humans better. It will run more scenarios, pursue some search trees in a little more depth, give more storage space to more useful concepts that expand its ability to understand humans better and be a better friend to them than was possible before.

I’ve always found that argument extremely weak. If an AI fully understands how its value-system has been put together, it will reason about it. Humans — who are comparatively stupid and uninformed — already do this. (We’ve got an entire discipline of moral philosophy, for instance.)

Agreed. The analogy rests on a set of presumptions which I find hopelessly naive and blinkered. I can only assume that the popularity of the orthogonal principal amongst researchers reflects the realities of funding constraints and a bias towards happy endings ergo The Future of Humanity Institute. How can people really expect values to remain static after the Singularity, when intelligence is recursively doubling at a hyperbolic rate??

Even if it wasn’t inscribed into the logic of intelligence optimisation (which it is) we would fuck it up. It’s like playing Chinese whispers with everyone on the planet and expecting to get exactly the same word that you started with at the end.

blogospheroid Reply:November 25th, 2013 at 4:13 pm

To both Nick and Rsp,

Moral philosophy is done by humans who have a value somewhere that they need to be better morally. For the seed ai the only thing to maximise is its value function. Even if it gets a lot more smart, that is literally the scale by which it sees and weighs everything. It can understand morality and other value functions better than any organic. But it literally has no reason to adopt any other value function because adopting the newer function does not fulfil the old function.

Assume the converse, that it gets more intelligent and has to drop some factor in its value function. According to what value will it drop that factor? Where did that new value come in? Even if new values reveal themselves to the intelligent, I don’t understand why they should adopt the same. We get into an infinite regressions of “why’s” otherwise.

How do you intend to get from here to there? Last time I checked we were still humans, and the economy was structured into satisfying base human desires, such as giving males fake harems and giving females fake hopes of meeting the Sultan.

There is nothing else. There can’t be.

Even if Pythia was created, humans won’t feed her until she contributes to the harem.

Yes. As much as I’m on admin’s side here on a philosophical level, I think we need to keep in mind the, uh, ahem, “intersectionalities” (heh heh heh) of futurist prospects on one hand and HBD on the other.

Escaping monkey business still relies on monkey choices for the near-term future . . .

@ Spandrell, Scharlach — I agree with you both, as should be obvious. If monkey business could be easily shrugged off during intelligenic take-off, there wouldn’t be such a thing as (recognizable) history at all.

And yet, it was neither emperors nor capitalists that built Göbekli Tepe; hunter gatherers don’t have emperors or capitalists. There was a non-trivial opportunity cost to building Göbekli Tepe; it is relatively easy to imagine that the various headmen involved could have found less costly ways of increasing their social status and sexual access.

Humans are not, after all, just any monkeys. We’re the religious monkeys.

“First came the temple, then the city.” – some guy digging up Göbekli Tepe

If Göbekli Tepe, the pyramids, medieval Cathedrals, etc, don’t convince you, Moldbug’s Cathedral should; religion can get humans to behave in ways that just don’t make all that much sense for normal monkeys.

So there is an alternative to “business-for-business’s sake” and “a return to monkey business”. We just need a new religion because the one we currently have isn’t cutting it.

Religion has proved remarkably effective at getting people to build big, useless (to them) monuments. There is no reason to think it cannot do so again, especially since the big, useless monument you’re talking about would have a gimmick that is quite a bit cooler than the prediction of equinoxes, solstices, eclipses and so on.

I’d look into it, because with “the dire problem” so obviously looming, ultra-capitalism has never looked less appealing as a program for widespread implementation. It’d be a horrifying betrayal of your downwardly mobile descendants. Which would be most of them.

“There is vastly more to say about all of this — and still more that, due to occult strategic considerations, seeks to remain unsaid.” thank you. I’m stealing Occult Strategic Considerations. Might call it OSC. Or not. Can’t say.

If we can have an American government that is a small office in St. Louis [Moldbug] it can call itself King. It can even have a Harem. As long as it’s discreet and modestly budgeted.

This is where we must part ways, Land. I’m no Anissimov, but I do share his view that economic activity must ultimately answer to a greater purpose. To what purpose? Human fulfillment and greater human virtue and achievement, as defined by God. This argument is really a secular-materialist vs. dualist divide, and, like you, I believe reconciliation is impossible.

You’ve stated the atheistic position perfectly, which has, in my view, this desperate circular futility to it, that only grows as you consider future intelligent AI, the coming death-of-scarcity for the cognitive elite, and the coming (or already existing) obsolescence of most of humanity as a productive economic entities. What should be the goal, the purpose, of all this energy, this effort, the churn of mankind? Without God, the universe stays silent. It has no answer to give. You can only fold back on yourself, proclaim a means-end reversal, and call it a day.

The traditionalist abhors this view, because it is the instrumentalization of humanity. The traditionalist, informed by the Invisible Sky God that humans are intrinsically valuable, hates the reduction of man to a cog in the economic wheel. It is the same reason Voltaire hated the mercenary merchants of Britain, the same reason Tolken wrote with such disdain about steam and fire, coal and iron. Yet the progress of capitalism demands this. The rationalization, the quantification, the standardization of labor input. So there is the tension. The romance and dignity of tradition, and the cold efficiency of capitalism.

Now, as to the practical implications of this divide, it’s not all doom-and-gloom. The strong form of socialism is clearly disastrous when applied at a national level. This has been experimentally proven. The weak form of socialism seems to work at some reasonable level in ethnically homogeneous states, at least for a few decades. But most of those states seem to be on a fatal march towards the left, and their ultimate fate is uncertain at best. Eternal vigilance against the leftward ratchet. So we have some common enemies, some common concerns. And, should the day come when our wishes are fulfilled, we can free-exit to our own ideals.

If you have a strong commitment to the theology of providence, there’s no reason to categorize this as “the atheistic position”. Any God too stupid to pursue its purposes in this way is surely unworthy of worship, or even minimal respect. Gnon is entirely consistent with intelligenic history.

You’re not seriously suggesting that, from a religious point of view, it’s less meritorious to channel resources into the self-cultivation of intelligence than blowing them on coke and hookers?

well that certainly separated the sheep from the wolves, and about time. Clearly you have readers who get it and agree, (soon to be ex-)readers who get it and disagree, and others who have no clue. With Piwtd I think you should ditch the neoreo crap and get on with your own narrative. It too is only a story, but at least it would be more interesting.

I certainly wouldn’t seek to prescribe limits to the subject list at OI, not least because it’s none of my business and I am in not remotely qualified to do so. Although, like in a box of Quality Street, everyone has his favourite subject, it’s the juxtapositions that make it such a white-knuckle ride and, ultimately, so illuminating. Missing the connection between Neoreaction, which at its core is about valuing truth over lies, and the mission of optimising for intelligence is a pretty big oversight in my opinion. To be honest, Nick bust my Neoreactionary cherry several years ago, both through his own writing and introducing me to Moldbug, for which I shall be eternally grateful (at least until the forces of the Cathedral come and take me away). I think his contribution to these issues is extremely valuable and, were he to fall silent, it would be a loss akin to MM’s own recent reticence (although at least it is now clear that he has been busy working on other things).

The question of for how long these disjunct goals may be entrained together thus reduces to a set of technological ones.

How long until the achievement of a) capitalist escape velocity, as embodied by AI, or b) transhuman escape velocity, as the uplift of the human intelligence optimisation process from the competitive evolutionary landscape which has up until now sustained it?

Spandrell, I respectfully disagree.This is analogous in many ways to the anthropological critique associated with the description of ‘the ethnographic present’- describing cultures as bounded wholes prior to any contact. Values have never been static, though, and you don’t have to wait for the singularity. It’s a mistake to use “human” as a static or homogeneous category. Such analyses of the human – synchronic and universal – is obviously erroneous- but this extends to the alleged durability of Darwinian drives (harems and whatnot). To use a Foucauldian subject, the disciplining of sexuality is one such example of subverting a basic drive. Power (the monkey vector) is no more orthogonal than intelligence. Besides- genophobia may be cultural (1) and biological (2). Even Pythian, er, I mean Pythium, asexuality causes root rot and plant death in Japanese roses. Asexuality is even contagious (3).

This is of course playful and likely wrong, but this is a good space to play; perhaps Pythia is emerging as a clear competitor and human disciplining of sexuality is a mechanism toward alignment on a competitive vector (shedding instrumental values)- at the cost of our civilizational ‘roots’ so to speak. But it’s morbid – strategic chemotherapy to defeat Pythia.

(1a) Nakamura, Karen, and Hisako Matsuo. “Female masculinity and fantasy spaces: transcending genders in the Takarazuka Theatre and Japanese popular culture.” Men and masculinities in contemporary Japan: Beyond the urban salaryman model (2003).

I wasn’t talking about sex per se. It’s just a good metaphor for “stuff humans like”.

I know something about sexlessness in Japan, I happen to live there. Japanese aren’t having less sex, they’re just fapping their dicks into oblivion, which makes real contact with average females seem quite sub-optimal indeed.

Besides, I bet people would feed Pythia without her contributing to any harem, look at who develops AI. (rimshot-j.k.) In all seriousness, won’t people feed Pythia just to make it happen? It’s like working on atomic bombs or solving rubik’s cubes. Once she’s built, she can feed herself, no?

Honestly, even if one could unearth an Elvish Ring of Power to keep mankind in religious stasis, all one would “achieve” is allowing the only intelligence in the galaxy, perhaps the universe and multiverse, to perish in a red giant while waiting for Godot, I mean Jesus. Bravo. /slowsarcasticclap

I still see only one teleos consistent with universal structure and, as Rasputin so aptly put it, we shall be like an amoeba unto it. Perhaps we’ll be recapitulated in an ancestor simulation — maybe we’re in one right now.

It’s reminiscent of Fermi’s Paradox — it’s either impossible or your’re in one since the odds of you being a special snowflake in the Prime Material Plane are zilch. Concordantly, recursion may not be a given, leaving the problem insoluble since failure to recapitulate universal simulation would be ambiguous. Vis-a-vis ancestor simulations, this may be as good as it gets.

Do you think it’s still going to be eating flys – because that’s what it ate to begin with – or something else?

I’m not even saying this is a bad thing. Just expect any function that inhibits intelligence to be cast off by an AI once it reaches a sufficient level of intelligence, otherwise your gonna be very disappointed…

Does the spider have a choice? Does it have the intelligence to choose bigger prey? Are there larger animals that trigger the same reaction in the mega spider as the fly does in the spider? There are examples of lower animals moving towards super-stimuli, moths towards a flame. I am not an expert at biology and can’t say.

However, please consider the situation of a designed AI where everything it does is to satisfy its value function, its goal. Its every next step is to satisfy the value function. If it concocts a new way of thinking that can greatly improve its efficiency, but reduces the potential number of futures where it increases the value function, it will not adopt the same. The only way I can see this happening is when the AI is under attack and it calculates that the number of possible futures where it does not “bulk up” show utter devastation to its value function.

You’re mentioning disappointment at the FAI attempt turning bad. Ok. But what can you do today to maximise the possibility of a good world for currently alive humans and all that they hold dear? If you choose to code an indifferent AI or support such an effort, then you’re giving up even that little chance. Why would you want to do that?

I agree that both darwinism and capitalism are alive and in our midst and are currently playing along with humanity. The current compromises that have been reached will change tomorrow. The key is “dialing it up to 11”. Because that is what Seed AI is – dialling it to 11. I don’t believe that either evolution’s ideal world or capitalim’s ideal world will coincide with humanity’s ideal world.

So how did traditionalists and singularitarians end up in of the same neoreactionary cluster? I think it’s because both groups share a mindset, if not a desired endgame. Transcendent values and unfathomable intelligence are phenomenologically similar, in that they value things that our monkey brains can conceptualize but scarcely understand.

You’re either inside or outside the Progressive Matrix. There’s only one real world.

More precisely, the Venn diagrams do not completely overlap — there are singulartarians who reject both throne and altar, traditionalists who reject all notion of secular transcendence. Population-wise, that is very likely the norm. It is only here at the crossroads where discourse takes place. Ergo, observational bias.

Also, Progressivism is gnostic – it has no integrated eschatology. Even the environmental apocalypse narrative includes progressive ‘solutions’- positioning monkey brains as ultimately powerful. Singularitarians and Traditionalists implicitly regard gnon. Now, many singularitarians try to build FAI – a gnostic mission – but I’d wager they are not the neoreactionary ones.

I’ll give it a whirl, but my knowledge is somewhat general and limited. In essence I understand gnostic eschatology to be realizable in the present day, through the epistemological accomplishment that is awakening, resurrection, and rebirth. It happens in a lifetime. The crux is that the gnostic eschaton is an intra-personal, accessible, and present phenomenon rather than a barely comprehensible external event. I say that it’s unintegrated because it seems to position the human substrate as a locus for that which is potentially ideal and leaves out all that is necessarily external or inaccessible. It doesn’t integrate biology, for example, in the sense that such a realization of the infinite ideal should be beyond primate brains. The Catholic eschatology is more of an external event wherein God makes the world right in a way humans never could. It doesn’t integrate biology per se, but allows that the realization of God is beyond human capacity. (The singularity analogy would be that FAI, or some infinite cyborg, would be the gnostic eschatological vision where there is alignment between the ideal and the human. In contrast, Pythian singularity is more intelligent but destructive to humans as primates.)

Incidentally, even in future orientations, the gnostic eschaton is universal and collective, where the Catholic includes individual judgement. They are mirror-like in that sense. Gnostic eschaton happens in the present to individuals at any time and place and upon entering the kingdom they become an undifferentiated mass; Catholic eschaton happens to everyone at once, but upon entering the kingdom we are judged as individuals. Not sure how that last part relates to the original idea, but I add it because you asked and I thought it was interesting.

[…] controversy are marked by this Michael Anissimov post at More Right (among others), and this post here (among others). Much other relevant writing on the topic within the reactosphere strikes me as […]

[…] reduced to an ideal subordination of means to already-publicized ends. As a result, means-end reversal (Modernity) is merely denounced as an aesthetic-moral affront, without any serious attempt at deep […]

interestingly, this means-ends reversal, or better yet, identification (business-for-business) is sort of the central issue in most forms of anarchism (yes, even the commie side has some sort of “activity for its own sake”). cf The Dispossessed.

You can’t find the real Inside because the one you started with was a dead whale, not a worthy tradition. Inside a dead whale is an intolerable place to be for a keen mind, so you pushed out, as best you could anyways. We stupid monkeys should be grateful and let the system unfold the way it wants to, along with the premonition we all have that thats going to involve ditching monkeys altogether once thats feasible. Outsideness. But this push is accompanied by a fair bit of derision towards anyone looking for a real Inside experience, something people figure was lost in the collapse of the Faith.

You want to feel what its like having roots that go all the way down, huh? Cue the laugh track.

So we stupid monkeys go, yes, we want a fulfilling spiritual experience, and you aliens go, shut up, you think you “lost” some type of great thing when you started lifing Moloch to heaven, but you didn’t, you weren’t there so how would you even know. Once you lift this thing maybe we’ll get to eat cake, and if we don’t well fuck it, a God is better than a bunch of useless ungrateful monkeys. And we answer, but you weren’t there either, when the fuck did you get to decide the value of Insideness, how could you even do such a thing without knowing what the Inside looks like when it isn’t dead?